West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Wild Trout

West Virginia's only native trout is alive and well

June 17, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

EYEWITNESS ONLINE WEBCAST VIDEO
C L I C K T O P L A Y

That's a pretty decent sized one, especially for White's Creek.

Steve Brown knows a thing or two about fly fishing for brookies, it's his passion.

Thanks to the hard work of his buddies over at the DNR's Cold Water Fisheries program, Steve has plenty of fish to catch in West Virginia's prettiest creeks and rivers.

Mike Shingleton/Dnr Biologist
Wild trout in West Virginia are very important to us as a resouce agency and to area anglers. We have our trout stocking program, which many people enjoy, we're also very heavily involved in our wild trout fishery, which is our brook trout, reproductive rainbow, we have a fingerling stocking program.

Most of the fingerlings are brown trout, and if you've been fishing much, you've probably either caught one yourself or watched somebody land one of those beautys.

But these brookies are just stunning and thanks to the wild trout program, there are a bunch in our waters.

Mike Shingleton/DNR Biologist says
We're involved in the Eastern Brook Trout venture which is a partnership between 17 states in the east, several Federal agencies and Trout Unlimited and other groups to protect and serve the brook trout fisheries that we have.

It doesn't get much better than this, fishing in a stream where there is nobody around. Maybe there are six or seven brookies in this pool of water and I'll see if I can get one.

I didn't have any luck, but Steve, he reeled in a few in pretty tough conditions.

Steve Brown/Wild Trout Fisherman
Normally, most brook trout streams, brook trout aren't normally finicky and about the only time I've seen them get finicky is when a good hatch is going on. Normally you can put a humpy or a beetle and, if you're stealthy going upstream, you can do pretty well.

And even if you don't, it's a blast. For West Virginia Wildlife, I'm Patrick McMurtry, Eyewitness News.